Tapio Rummukainen, Managing Director – MLFI, says that the company is expanding its R&D considerably by starting a project called AGV 4.0, under Open Innovation Platform.

“This is a €16 million R&D center investment to self-navigating AGVs,” says Rummukainen, adding that increased R&D will also lead to increased production somewhere down the road.

But why did the Japanese parent company choose Finland for this cutting-edge center? – Rummukainen says that Finland is a great fit for demanding R&D which requires talent-heavy experts to get the job done.

“We have the technical competence that is simply a must in this field. Finland possesses a highly educated workforce and there is ambitious, internationally acclaimed research by universities and institutes here,” Rummukainen comments.

Building on Tradition, Building for Future

Then there’s the well-functioning society and support from the public sector: Finland is simply a place with a great track record of making things work.

“There’s a sense of security and trust in the future, too.”

In this case, also the State of Finland got involved, with Olli Rehn, Minister of Economic Affairs, making a visit to Japan in 2016. After the trip, work continued with the Invest in Finland team both in Japan and Finland.

Finally, as Business Finland OK’d innovation funding for MLFI’s R&D center-to-be, the Japanese parent company fully committed to the venture.

Invest in Finland welcomes MLFI plans for Finland. Finland has an excellent ecosystem in the area of autonomous vehicles, with several complementary technologies emerging like 5G for industrial applications in private networks.” The MLFI case is also a great sign of the deep cooperation between Japanese companies and Finland”, says Janne Kari the Head of Industry, ICT & Digitalization in Invest in Finland.

Long Time Coming

Hi-tech savvy never materializes over-night – and in the case of AGV R&D center, it is clear that the required expertise has accumulated over a long period of time. Jani Mähönen, Director, Digital Services & Solutions Development, Logistic Solutions, says that a key part of this evolution was the company’s strong emphasis in the product development of warehouse trucks, AGVs, and counterbalance trucks in 2013-2014.

“For us, that was an important step in developing a competitive product,” Mähönen looks back. He believes that a big part of that competitiveness comes from the company’s lean and agile R&D culture:

“We have low hierarchy with very little bureaucracy – and open and honest communication throughout the organization,” he says, pointing out that even human mishaps can serve as basis for new ideas and improvement.

“Furthermore, cost vs. quality ratio in engineering work is pretty solid – and not too much middle management is needed.”

One Automation Solution Fits All?

Rummukainen and Mähönen explain that the AGV investment does not mean pursuing full automation in every case: actually, most often the full automation is not the optimal solution.

“Typically, automation is meaningful only in some processes, while digitalization or standardization is enough for the others,” says Tapio Rummukainen.

MLFI’s answer here is Mixed Fleet Solution, which combines the efficiency of automation and the adaptability of the manual processing.

Here’s how it works: Once MLFI knows what kind of processes a customer has, it can offer its standard solutions – or help the customer to standardize them. Once standardized, MLFI professionals can integrate digital solutions to the customer’s existing systems. 

But which of these processes can and should be automated? "We can help the customer to find the best automation solution in each case,” promises Jani Mähönen.

Ecosystem Rooted on Open Source

MLFI is not the sole operator out there, when it comes to AGVs – in fact, there’s an entire autonomous vehicle technology ecosystem that is quickly emerging. Finland does host a variety of OEMs and technology providers in this field – as well as extensive research and education in autonomous vehicles.

There is also a new collaboration group within FIMA community (Forum for Intelligent Machines), with a work title “Platform Economy for Autonomous Mobile Machines, initiated by MLFI. This community is looking for new forms of collaboration in national level, such as becoming active member in ROS2 (Robot Operating System 2), a global open source community. The original ROS has become a standard for research of software development for robotic systems, but lacks the level of maturity and stability needed for industrial scale production use. ROS2 is to mend these deficiencies and is enjoying major support from international companies.

“Finnish companies need to be active partners of ROS2 community in order to remain competitive in the future,” believes Mähönen.